


Somebody I Used to Know

by ashesandhoney



Category: Infernal Devices Series - Cassandra Clare
Genre: Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, Multi, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-08-28
Updated: 2015-10-13
Packaged: 2018-04-17 15:15:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,404
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4671404
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ashesandhoney/pseuds/ashesandhoney
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A stranger sat down across from her at a cafe and told her that he knew her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Tessa looked up when she heard the muffled swearword and the thump. She was halfway through a cup of tea and a brand new novel she had bought that afternoon. She looked up over the rim of the cup to see a man with light brown eyes staring at her. His friend stood at his shoulder frowning at him. They'd collided. She pursed her lips and raised her eyebrows before dropping her attention back to her book. She wasn't sure she had ever been cause-an-accident pretty in her life but he had stared at her like she was. Her lip pulled up in a smile but she didn't look back up. She tried to give him time to escape any embarrassment.

He didn't try for an escape.

"Jack," the friend's voice was a warning. 

The chair across from her scraped as he pulled it out and sat down. He leaned against the table. A white shirt pushed up to the elbows over brown skin. She didn't look up at him and he didn't speak.  She took another sip of her tea and turned the page. 

"This isn't my interested face," she told him in a calm voice. 

"Jack, leave the lady alone," the friend tried again, sarcasm dripping off the words. His fingers were pale with a sprinkling of freckles over the knuckles. Knuckles that were almost white as he clenched his fists and leaned on on the table beside Jack's elbow. 

"I know you," Jack said. 

She looked up, prepared to tell him that he was a stranger but something in his expression stopped her. His face was unfamiliar. Young, in his early twenties, all sharp cheekbones and sensual lips. His expression was just the tiniest bit wary. He was aware he was being crazy. Still, there was an earnestness there. He meant what he had said. 

"I don't believe we've met before," she told him in a voice that was far calmer than she felt. It was hard to make her uneasy. Tessa Gray was into her third century and after 300 years, it got hard to surprise someone. Pushy men in cafes were not all that shocking but this one wasn't following any of the scripts she expected. 

"We haven't," he said. 

"Jackson, leave it," the friend said and something about the way he said used the full name pulled her attention. He wasn't any more familiar than his friend. Green eyes, brown hair that was thinking about being red but not quite making it, freckles, an angular face. Still, the way he had grabbed hold of Jack's sleeve brought back memories so old she wasn't sure some days that they had ever truly happened. 

"I'm crazy," Jackson said. 

"That's an excellent pick up line, I bet you do well with all the ladies," she said. 

He laughed. Deep and bright and real. The friend sat down in the other chair as though trying to reduce the amount of a scene they were causing. He didn't let go of Jack who continued to speak, "I'm actually crazy. Usually my delusions are pretty harmless, ghosts and green men in the streets, that sort of thing. But you're something else." 

"You have the sight," Tessa said with a smile of relief. The flight of fancy, that ancient memory, all fell apart at her feet and she let it. Some fantasies weren't worth the pain they brought. She hadn't let this thought cross her mind in nearly a century and it wasn't worth the tears that would come if she opened the door on that little locked room full of memories. 

"So says my Nana but she's always been full of crackpot ideas about faeries in the hills," Jack said and then turned to his friend before he could say anything and said kindly, "Shut up, Chris," before locking his eyes on Tessa again, "You though, you aren't a ghost. I dream about you sometimes." 

"Dreams?" she asked. Maybe this was an elaborate pick-up scheme. Pull her in with the story, tell her she was the girl of his dreams. 

"Most of them are more mad than telling a girl in a cafe that you dream about her," he said. 

"Now you've brought it up, I need to know," she said. 

"I was pretty sure you weren't real," he said, "It's all impressions, not stories. Mornings that taste like tea and smell like lavender. You reading poetry, just a voice. Kisses that taste like blood and wet rough wood floors and so much anger. Paris before the wars." 

She stared at him. 

Stared at his unfamiliar face, his self-deprecating smile, his beautiful eyes. In one movement she pushed away from the table and walked out of the cafe. The door clanged shut behind her. She pressed her hands into her pockets and took a deep breath before heading across the street at a dead run. She hit the other sidewalk and had a moment of panic. She didn't know where to go. 

It was the friend, Chris, who caught her elbow before she made it to the corner and her already elevated heart rate took off even faster. The panic was on her face. She knew it was. She couldn't make enough sense of the emotion to suppress it or control it. He looked at her with concern in every line of his face and was sure. It wasn't the right face but it was an expression she knew. He was busy apologizing for Jackson. 

"You found each other. I always believed you would. I just didn't think I would ever see you again," she interrupted. 

"What? I don't understand," he said. 

"It doesn't matter. I can't face this. I can't do this," she said and she could feel the tears welling and no matter how sure she was - and she was sure - he was a stranger. She didn't want to cry in front of him. She swallowed back the sobs and looked down at his shoes. Runners. Battered and brightly coloured. She started to cry. 

"Hey, hey, Tess, what's happening? I don't understand," he said.

"Just swear to me, promise me, that no matter what happens, you'll take care of each other, please," she said. 

"Of course, we always have," he said. 

She nodded and wiped the tears away. She looked at him and he was exactly her height. Not taller. He should have been taller and the green eyes surprised her. They were not what she was expecting.  Still, she held them for a long time before she turned and she left him standing in the street staring after her. He didn't chase her this time. 

It wasn't until she was home, curled up in a heavy blanket and a pair of headphones whispering violin music into her ears, that she realized he'd called her by name. 


	2. Chapter 2

It was Chris who caught her eye on a bus and blinked a few times before looking down at his hands and then back up. He gave her a smile. Sweet and awkward and sad. Then he turned to look out the window. He didn't look back. She ignored him as hard as he was ignoring her but when the crowd shifted at a station, she saw that he had a violin case across his knees. As the crowd moved, she took the abandoned spot beside him. 

He turned back to her and started to speak twice. 

"I apologize," she said as he said, "Look, I'm sorry." 

He laughed and it was almost familiar. She reached out and touched his violin case and he watched her with curious eyes. Green. She was about to look up at him and she reminded herself that they were green eyes so they wouldn't surprise her into saying to doing something unreasonable. His freckles were adorable and his hair was tucked up under a hat. She felt old looking at him. He was a person just starting out. He was also considering her with eyes that weren't childish in the slightest. 

He made his decision and tilted his head toward her and started a story like they were old friends. 

"Jackson paints. Ever since he was a little kid. One of the therapists his parents sent him to thought it would help him. He'd draw things and then the therapist would ask him to sort them all into things that were real, like his little brother and the swing set and the things that weren't. The monster with all the arms. The black horse. The boy with the golden eyes. Over the years he's gone through a lot of therapists but the art stuck. He's pretty good these days," he said. 

Tessa watched him, watched the way his face moved as he talked. He was animated, bright and wary but not scared of her. He behaved as though she wasn't the strangest thing in the world. It was taking effort for him to behave so normally. She found herself wondering how much he knew of how strange the world truly was. 

"He'll paint landscapes he's never seen, we traced one back once, he drew it over and over - on purpose - and we finally found it. It's a big hill in Wales. His paintings are missing a town there but they're the same hill. Mountain, they call it a mountain but I grew up in Colorado, it's not a mountain," he said. 

"Cadair Idris," she said. 

He looked up at her sharply. She knew that she was right. She glanced out the window at the stop she had intended to get off at and then looked back at him as the crowd shifted. It wasn't really the place for a private conversation so she wove them a little glamour. She pulled strings of silence down around them so no one would look twice, no one would remember what they heard. 

"He draws you too," Chris said, not asking how or why she knew what she did, "Over and over. In dresses and ballgowns that are centuries old. You with books and you with flowers and you with children. He went through a period in high school where he learned how to do digital painting and photoshop and he'd edit you into modern scenes in modern clothes. There are other characters in his delusions, the boy with the silver hair, the man in the robes, the woman with the black hair and the blue eyes but there's a lot of you." 

"What's the going theory?" she asked. 

"Possession apparently, that was before I knew him but there were nightmares when he was a kid. Robots with swords for arms or monsters with red eyes or giant things that moved like worms," Chris seemed to find this funny. "They ruled out demons and schizophrenia then a pile of other mental illnesses because none of the treatments have ever worked. They're memories. You can apparently tell the difference between hallucination and memory if you have enough brain scanners. His brain has coded all of it down like a memory. He remembers you. He remembers riding horses even though the first time he ever saw a horse was when he was fourteen." 

Tessa nodded along, offering nothing, just taking in the stories. She had done a lot of research and she slotted this new information into it. She also just watched this boy talk. His hands were narrow, with freckles across his knuckles. His scarf was twisted tight around his neck and it looked homemade. 

"That's when I met him. My parents own a horse ranch in the foothills of the mountains. It's one of those awful places that caters to the very rich. Jackson Breen is very rich. He and his brothers were the type of cocky assholes who think they know everything. So when they came out to the arena, in gear that was expensive even by the standards of our place and he said he wanted to ride my horse, I let him. I wasn't usually allowed to talk to the guests. I was, I still am really, a horrible brat. I was in the corner working with a retired racehorse that wasn't allowed near the paying guests," he was smiling at the story and talked with his hands gesturing like he could sketch out the story in his head.

"Jax, he got up on that horse and when she took off - she always took off the first time a rider got on, like she was testing them - he not only didn't fall off but he had her reigned in and doing what he wanted before they'd made it to the other side of the arena. It wasn't natural talent. I thought they'd had training. He knew how to brace his feet in stirrups, he knew how to keep the reigns in the right place so he didn't have to pull and the horse still knew what he wanted. His brothers... weren't that good," he said. 

"They all laughed about how Jack had found another secret talent. He had - at fourteen - already proven to have terrific aim with a bow and arrow and to be able to throw kitchen knives like weapons. He can also occasionally read things in dead languages. If he doesn't think about it, he can read Latin like it were English. If he looks at it, tries to do it, the ability is gone but if it's his subconscious? Perfect Latin," Chris fell silent and looked at her.

"It's not a short explanation," she said. 

"But you have one," he said, "And somehow I'm a part of it." 

"Of course you're a part of it," she said. 

He shook his head and gathered up the instrument case in his lap and held it like it was a teddy bear. Just for a moment then he put it back down as though he realized what he was doing. Tessa almost touched him. Her fingers inside her gloves ached to trace the nervous little purse of his lips. He looked at her and she forgot for a moment that the colour of his eyes was wrong. It was him. Her Jem. She blinked back the tears as he shook his head and knocked a little piece of that red brown hair out from under his hat. 

"I'm not a part of it. I get Jackson when no one else does. I love that idiot but I'm nothing special or strange. I don't have secret talents," he said. 

"Yes, you do, you are incredible," she swapped languages while he was laughing and he didn't look up at the Mandarin.  

"No, I'm not," he said leaning forward. 

"When did you pick this up?" she asked touching the violin case again. 

"Four years ago," he said, "An arts elective at university." 

"But you can play things like Beethoven's Sonata for Violin No.9," she said. 

"You are going to explain how you know that. Sometimes a person has a talent. I'm not a world class violinist. I find it easier than some people maybe, it makes more sense but I still have to practice at it. How did you know about that one though? How did you know I can play that?" he said. 

"I can probably hum songs that you've been playing since before you mastered the bow positions but can't find anywhere. You've tried every piece of software imaginable to track down the bits of music that come out when you aren't really think about it and sometimes it's a Brahms and sometimes it is no where as though you dreamed it up out of your head. I have some of the only recordings of pieces that were never published. Some of them never written down at all," she said. 

"I've missed my stop," he said turning away from the conversation, twisting away from her to look out at the city.  

"Me too," she said glancing out the window. 

"Are you going to disappear again?" he asked. 

"I live a very strange life," she said, "Very strange. But there are absolutes in it. The two of you, are outside of my absolutes, outside of what I understood. I've done some reading since then. I thought I would not find you again. That there was one impossible moment and then it would vanish. I was meant to leave town. Boston is not home for me and I had decided that morning to return to London even with all its problems but I stayed. I stayed and I read and I called people who know more than I do and I kept looking until I thought I understood it." 

"Care to share?" Chris asked. 

"I will but first, go ask," she paused to pull up the right name because the wrong one kept creeping up her throat like it needed to be said, "Jackson about violin music. You fit into his stories as deeply as I do." 

"No one fits into his stories as deeply as you do," he said. 

"And yet, you are the one who called me by name," she said and he stared at her. She held out a piece of paper. Not a number, just a place and a time. The next day at a pub just up the road from the cafe where she had run into them the first time. He took it without saying anything. She undid the glamour and then leaned in to kiss him on the cheek and then she got up and stepped off with the next stop. She disappeared back into the magic and let herself vanish as she walked out into the road and away from him again. 

 


	3. Chapter 3

Tessa sat in a booth in the back of a pub on a Wednesday evening and questioned every choice she had made. She questioned the wisdom of staying in Boston and believing fairy tales. She told herself she was lonely and lost and that wasn't an excuse to drag other people into it. She whispered warnings to herself that even if she was right, she was only going to make their lives harder. No one wanted to be saddled with a story like this.

Then they were late and that hurt. The thought that they weren't going to come and it didn't matter. It felt like a loss. A shadow of losses she had thought she had come to terms with.

She was lost in that tizzy of thought when they sat down across from her. Chris looked curious but wary and Jackson was trying very hard not to stare. They were just humans. Just mundane boys in their early twenties. Nobodies. In a world of angels and demons and battles for the world, these two had been born outside of the fight. They sat close, shoulder to shoulder, leaning into each other just a little bit.

No one spoke.

"Where do you want to start?" Tessa asked.

"The beginning?" Jack said.

"The world is not as you think it is," she said, "Vampires and werewolves walk this city as they do nearly every city of the world. Angels and demons, true evil and the true blazing fires of righteousness have touched the earth. There are faerie courts in the hills, your grandmother was right on that much. There are warlocks who will live until the end of the world or until something kills them first."

"And I thought I was crazy," Jack said but it was more to fill the gap than because he doubted her. She could see it on his face. He didn't doubt her.

"I was born in 1862 in New York," she said. "In 1878, I found myself in London and learned I wasn't nearly as human as I had always imagined myself to be. I met a boy with blue eyes and an attitude problem. I married him eventually but that first night, I hit him with a jug and argued with him while he attempted to save my life. His best friend was dying, dying slowly and horribly of an illness without a cure but he never lived like he was dying. He loved and laughed and never gave up but that's not enough to keep a body alive."

She looked between them. They weren't arguing. Just listening as she had done on the bus. Chris took Jack's hand and laced their fingers together and he squeezed back and the piece she hadn't realized she was missing fell into place.

"He didn't die. He joined a monastic group and they froze his body at that point before death. They live outside time, the Silent Brothers. The silver haired boy and the man in the robes from your paintings, they're the same person. He lived like that for a hundred and thirty years before a miracle found him. It happened in the midst of a war and it nearly finished what the poison in his blood hadn't a century before but he came out the other side himself again," she paused, closing her eyes against a rush of memories of bridges and lacework scars and his voice.

"He outlived Will. Will and I had a lifetime but it was a human lifetime and it came to an end. Two children and five grandchildren and even a few great grandchildren before he passed on but he did," she didn't open her eyes. She didn't let the memories rise up often and opening this door was pulling up little scattered impressions that didn't feel like enough. She fell silent and grabbed hold of those memories of Will for long enough that Jack reached out to touch her fingers. She snapped her eyes open and pulled her hands back to rest in her lap.

"Will died, he crossed out of this world but he didn't turn. There are so many theories of what happens when we die and it's possible that it depends on what you believe. He came back, stuck his head in on the world sometimes, just to see how things were going. Or maybe I imagined him because I missed him," she said.

"Or his ghost waited," Chris said.

"They were human but not like you are. There is a ritual by which two people can bind themselves together. A bond meant to help them in battle but it was so much more. They were linked. Will wouldn't have gone on until Jem had come to meet him," she said.

"And when Jem got there, they moved on to whatever came next," Jackson said.

"Together, always together," she said.

"But everyone moves on. If reincarnation is real then why isn't everyone running around with loose memories rattling around their heads?" Chris asked setting his shoulders a little bit.

"Because a soul lives a hundred years and then moves on. They say you learn in each lifetime, a new lesson, a new skill, until finally you are able to leave the world entirely and enter heaven. Will held on for nearly two hundred years. And he held on hard. He kept a foot in the world," she said. It had taken her weeks of research to come to that conclusion but she said it like it was an unquestioned fact.  

"He broke his soul?" Chris said.

"Shut up. When he was reincarnated, I got all his memories instead of just his personality," Jackson said.

"Remember the 'what if the explanation is worse?' conversation? I don't know if this is worse but it is certainly weirder than I was imagining. You have an old dead Victorian man in your brain," Chris said.

"Shut up," Jackson said.

"It isn't as strong in you, Chris, but it's there as well. More echoes than true memories. The violin, calling me by name, you probably hate candy shops for no reason you can name. They just smell wrong and everyone thinks that's ridiculous," she said, "If I called you by your - by his - Chinese name, you'd answer me."

"You've got the candy thing down, he hates cotton candy," Jackson said with a little smile.

"Don't look so smug," Chris said.

"I have been a freak since I was old enough to talk. I always feared that the answer to what is wrong with me would be possession or just an overactive imagination and no ability to shut up. But not only am I not the only one but I'm pleased and relieved to have the answer be that I've been in love with you for centuries," he said.

Chris smiled like it was involuntary, like he wanted desperately to smack Jackson up the side of the head but couldn't bring himself to do it. The way Chris had said, "No one is as deeply a part of his stories as you are," hadn't seemed important the day before but it did now. He was in love with someone who had always been obsessed with someone else. Tessa looked over at Jackson who was watching Chris - not her - like he knew that. 

"Or this is a collective delusion, or perhaps you're fucking with me," he said. 

"Yes, I found someone and drew pictures of them all grown up for years because I knew exactly what she was going to look like. Oh, or I hired an actress - after a long and grueling talent search to find someone who looks like the woman I had been drawing since I was seven - to show up at a cafe and have a freak out just to bother you," Jackson said. 

"I would believe the second one over immortals and soul melding magic," Chris said, "You would go that far to screw with someone."

Tessa surprised herself by laughing at that. The way their fingers were laced together on the table eased something in her. Her fear that these memories had destroyed this boy's life started to fade. He carried Will but he wasn't Will. He had built his own life. Invented himself above and beyond the memories he'd found himself with. 

"Tea?" Tessa asked. She made a little bit of a show of conjuring a tea set, the kind that a pub would not keep on hand, out of thin air. They both watched her with wide eyes before Jackson started to laugh. He leaned into Chris who looked between him and Tessa with alarm in his face. 

Jackson just laughed harder and said,"That's awesome, what if I wanted scones too, can you do scones?"

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am not allowing myself to think too hard about this. This is just "see where it goes" kind of writing.

**Author's Note:**

> I haven't a clue how long this is going to be but there will be more chapters.


End file.
